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Archive: Mark Trail

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Sex and snow

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Mary Worth, 2/18/20

Oh no, it’s Jared! You might recall that back when Dawn was working a summer job at the hospital and falling hard for a doctor who was, unbeknownst to her, married, there was a rival for her affections: Jared, a dorky medical assistant who also transparently lusted after Dawn, offering to just come over to her apartment whenever, if she wanted him to. He was extremely clumsy and lived a sad life alone with his cat and his Star Wars action figures, but he seemed to be set up to be Dr. Ned’s “nice guy” foil, especially after he was the one who warned Dawn about Dr. Ned’s marital status. But at the end of the summer, Dawn ended up with neither of them, which, in its own small way, was a triumph for feminism, and it I find it all the sadder that Jared is apparently destined to win Dawn away not from some shitty two-timing doctor but rather from a perfectly nice age-appropriate Frenchman who has the misfortune of not being physically present.

Mark Trail, 2/18/20

Sure, becoming a social media “influencer” seems like it would be fun and easy, but if you go down that road, you will inevitably end up dead under a pile of snow, while some square-jawed, raven-haired technophobe tries to explain what “Instagram” is to a baffled Nepali police officer. Stop now before it’s too late! Turn off your phone and read a book or something!

Crankshaft, 2/18/20

I for one expected this story to be “everyone gets snowed in at the Valentie and Hannah ends up giving birth there.” And I appreciate it when the comics can surprise me with plot twists! But I don’t think any of us had any real interest in the story actually being “Crankshaft finally runs out of excuses and has to have sex with his girlfriend” instead.

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He’s beating them all up with his, uh, shaking powers

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Dennis the Menace, 2/12/20

Just to show you what it’s like to be me, a guy with a head full of random trivia, I read “homeowner’s rates” and thought Alice was using the British term for property taxes, which made me wonder if the Mitchells had relocated to the UK so that Dennis could take on his actually much more menacing rival. But a little Googling shows that sometimes people say “homeowner’s rates” when they mean “what I pay for homeowner’s insurance,” which sounds very strange to my ear but feel free to sound off in the comments if this is part of your everyday speech and you think that I, personally, am an idiot. The important thing here is that Dennis would not have any possible impact on the Mitchells’ property taxes, but could very well be the source of their skyrocketing insurance premiums, because he breaks so much stuff.

Dick Tracy, 2/12/20

Good news, everyone! Mysta escaped from Mr. Robot’s clutches and defeated him using her Lunarian powers, so now we’ve got a new story, about the origins of a bad guy called “Shakey,” because he shakes. Few things in recent comics history have made me laugh more than today’s Dick Tracy, in which the narration box says little Shakey “quickly learned the Golden Rule” and depicts him beating the shit out of other kids and stealing their money. There’s not even an attempt to make some kind of pun or wordplay on “Golden Rule!” “Here’s your Golden Rule, kids: just absolutely terrorizing people with violence is a great way to make a lot of cash.”

Mark Trail, 2/12/20

Ah, yes, it’s an all-too-common story: a sad, isolated person — say, an newly disabled man who isn’t sure who he is anymore — gets big on Twitter and gets a chance to reinvent himself — say, as a guy whose leg was eaten by a yeti. How often do we have to hear this tale before we learn its lessons? Anyway, Minga and Pemba are watching all this from afar, probably wondering if anybody is going to be able to pay them, now that the guy who hired them is dead.

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It’s very true to life that the Robo-Weirdly would just stand there grinning like an idiot instead of trying to escape

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Slylock Fox, 2/10/20

You ever think how lucky Slylock and the Glorious Animal Regime are that their rogues gallery never uses its resources to their full potential? Think of the havoc that you could wreak with the ability to create an android so lifelike that a policeduck could extensively interact with it and still not be able to tell that it’s artificial! Weirdly could be building an army of android warriors, as intelligent as any human (or animal) but indestructible and willing to destroy his enemies and make him a god-king, but instead he’s just deploying them as decoys while he goes on the lam. Anyway, the real reason you can tell that’s not a bio-Weirdly is that if it were a bio-Weirdly, that cave would be full of Weirdly poop.

Mark Trail, 2/10/20

“Look, Mark, I just want to make this absolutely clear: yes, I indulged and even helped promote Harvey’s bizarre, delusional story that his amputation, which had an entirely normal and reasonably explanation, was the result of a yeti attack, but we weren’t fucking, OK? Do you think I’m a weirdo or something?”

Six Chix, 2/10/20

Ahhh, it’s time to celebrate Valentine’s Day, Six Chix-style: Getting wine-drunk and vomiting up an entire box of chocolates so violently that you completely jam up your toilet! LOVE IS IN THE AIR, people.